Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,434 71,804 60.12% 257

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 3893 6194 7 1437
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 2908 4615 6 1228
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 2908 5028 7 1853
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2846 4438 14 389
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2676 4316 6 1177
21 West Anchorage 2640 4339 7 1224
27 Anchorage - Basher 2606 4113 6 987
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2483 4050 3 955
34 Mendenhall Valley 2402 4078 10 2628
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2295 3697 17 1116
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2275 3848 8 1037
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2266 3741 7 1267
04 Western Fairbanks 2188 3509 6 1591
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2174 3400 8 774
31 Homer/South Kenai 2155 4175 8 22
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2008 3274 6 23
17 Anchorage - University 1885 3139 4 885
29 North Kenai 1880 3052 9 30
23 Anchorage - Taku 1784 3023 10 843
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1749 3033 7 1416
11 Greater Palmer 1692 2694 15 2184
10 Rural Mat-Su 1687 2775 3 1251
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1638 2712 5 1251
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1600 2665 5 253
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1589 2410 1 353
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1589 2578 8 1001
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1512 2784 8 10
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1330 2237 6 1439
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1326 2206 12 3
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1309 2141 5 884
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1302 2171 4 480
15 Elmendorf 1289 2209 8 434
07 Greater Wasilla 1283 2276 5 2077
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1236 2355 2 23
03 North Pole/Badger 980 1695 3 668
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 920 1498 1 557
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 583 1195 5 32
38 Lower Kuskokwim 355 653 0 7
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 282 524 2 275
40 Arctic 240 540 3 15
99 NA 41 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.